Developers,
the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 port of Boomerang is working
again. It was broken recently when changes were made to have other
Windows ports (Cygwin and MinGW) perform proper dynamic loading of the
loader DLLs (at present, either ElfBinaryFile or Win32BinaryFile).
This is a useful capability, which may be used more in Boomerang (e.g.
loading one or other type analysis module, more back ends (e.g.
Pascal), etc.)
There are now 5 projects in the one solution:
1) boomerang (makes boomerang.exe, the main GUI executable)
2) BinaryFile (makes BinaryFile.dll)
3) ElfBinaryFile (makes ElfBinaryFile.dll)
4) Win32BinaryFile (makes Win32BinaryFile)
5) console (makes console.exe, the command line version of Boomerang).
To make console.exe, view the solution explorer, select the console
project, and from the Build menu select Build console. As of this
announcement, the console project makes but is not quite ready to run.
(You will likely have to start in the main directory, and run
Debug\consle <arguments>...)
My apologies to those Windows users that were inconvenienced by the delay.
- Mike

As a result of a recent donation, a US$40 prize is being offered
for the person that has the most accepted Boomerang bugs fixed by
20th December, 2004.
For details, see
http://boomerang.sourceforge.net/competition.html
The Boomerang administrators

QuantumG has checked in some changes which make compiling Boomerang with
Visual Studio .NET 2003 a lot easier. He has checked in gc.lib/dll and
libexpat.lib/dll and moved the config.win to win32make/include/config.h
and placed the corresponding gc.h and expat.h files in the
win32make/include directory also. He has also removed those irritating
"performance warnings" that VS.NET complains about. As such, you should
now be able to check out Boomerang, double click on the boomerang.vcproj
file in the root directory of the distribution and press build to get a
working exe.
- Mike

Both the Linux and Windows distributions of Boomerang version alpha
0.1 have been updated to fix minor but irritating problems:
. The Windows version was corrupting type names, e.g. "char *argv" was
coming out as a smiley face followed by "har" (no "*argv").
. The Linux version used absolute paths to the loader library files,
such as libElfBinbaryFile.so. It was also made with -g, so that the
executable was quite large. The whole distribution is now under 1 MB.
So if these problems have been preventing you from checking out
Boomerang properly, give it another try.
- Mike

The open source decompiler Boomerang has reached an alpha level
usability. As such we have made the first binary file release. This
release is for developers and experimenters only. If you're wanting to
do real work with Boomerang you're not going to have a very fun time,
but if you're interested in decompilation and have some experience
with alpha grade software, please download the release and report
bugs.
We know that several people have had trouble building boomerang, this
should make it quick to find out if Boomerang is for you. There are a
handful of test programs (none of them Win32) in the win32 version.
The other release is Linux/X86 only. Sorry, no RPMs or the like as
yet.
This is a binary only release. If you are after source code, go grab
it out of CVS. This release is strictly for developers and
experimenters.
You need to use .\boomerang <switches> <file> (note the dot and
reverse slash) for Windows, and of course the same but a forward slash
for Linux. We'll remove this restriction soon. Remember the output is
in the output/ directory; often an important error message will appear
at the end of output/log (again, this will be fixed at some stage).
About 90% of the tests in functest.sh (Linux version only) pass. Some
of them require -dt (debug type system) to produce correct output
(e.g. test/pentium/switch_gcc).
There is a known bug in the Windows version, where strings early in
the decompiled output are corrupted. Hopefully, most of the source
code is visible.
Enjoy, but remember, this is the very first release, and it is very
much alpha code (not even beta, where it is ready for outsiders to
test). So this is a preview only.
- Mike